Weird Magical Items and Narrative Reactivity

So, to take a break from podcasts or talking about Assassin’s Creed I recently caught up with an article on io9 called “The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons”. The intention of this article was to poke fun at some of the more apparently ridiculous items to be found in D&D’s extensive back catalogue of quest minutiae. I don’t know quite how this all works, as in, I’m not sure how these ideas come to be included in official D&D stuff.

Are D&D coast wizards constantly scribbling down ideas for these things in notebooks they keep close at hand day and night? Or do they, in fact, create new items in their own campaigns and then submit the best ones for inclusion in whatever volume of stuff they’re currently compiling? I tend to think the latter as the vast majority of insanely detailed plots, locations, NPCs etc. rise out of play sessions, response to, you know, actual players and the like.

So I guess that we can be comfortable in the notion that these things were not just summoned wholesale from the basement of imagination, made, as it were, from whole cloth. While some of the items seem, quite clearly, to be cursed objects intended to provoke a particular howl of simultaneous disbelief, horror and delight from players others, maybe, bore the marks of a thing I’m going to call “Narrative Reactivity”.

What is this new thing that I have created? Well, it’s less of a creation and more of an observation really. It’s about the nature of lazy creation when it comes to problems where your characters won’t behave in a story. Many times when this happens in role play it comes from the feeling the host has that managing the demands of the players is somewhat akin to herding cats. Maybe that feeling demands some more time in another post at another time, but right now we shall move swiftly on.

In writing the same thing can happen, and is possibly more upsetting for featuring characters dreamed up within your very living brain itself as opposed to being centred in the brains of other people who might be forgiven for not psychically understanding what you want to achieve in the story world you have built for them.

If the characters who come from your own mind start misbehaving, though, that can be, well, troubling. It puts forth the notion that you are not quite in control of parts of your mind, that people you dreamed up can have their own agendas. There’s something dark and mystical about your characters engaging in acts of sabotage against your story. In those cases you might find that the solutions the inexperienced or desperate author comes up with to fight against the tide of mutiny are more desperate, leading to the lazy introduction of plot-hole tearing technologies and surprise deus ex machinas and the like. So my hope with considering a few of these D&D items is to reveal something of the wiring under the board with regards to such incidents in the hope of guarding against such lazy story making.

Exhibit One: The Ring of Contrariness This “forces the wearer to disagree with everything anyone says” the author of the linked argument concludes that given the difficulty of forging magical artifacts this represents “a prime example of some wizard wasting his time.”

This is actually quite an easy one to unpick. It smells like a GM consulting on a D&D expansion met a player who was quiet and unassuming, someone who just appeared to tag along behind in every session. So in a GM ambush this player ends up with this ring on their finger and is magically required to stir up trouble, the peacemaker has become the agitator. Was this fun, or torture, for the player targetted? We will never know.

So, yes, the idea of a wizard inside the narrative bothering to make such an apparently useless artifact is troublesome. So much so that the meta-purpose of the item appears for more clearly than an in-story reason for someone to forge such an irritating artifact. However, the existence of such an item would appear to be a great opportunity for a budding story teller. How did this ring come to be? That is a tale to be told.

From a gamer’s perspective, of course, the item is a curiosity, leading to some sort of game outcome of no major import. If the reasons for its inclusion were indeed as stated above it may have arisen out of a misplaced desire to see all players fully participate in the game. GMs feel that if someone seems not to quite be in the game that this is necessarily a problem in need of resolution when, in reality, some people just like to be along for the ride.

The up front way to deal with a player who doesn’t appear to be participating to the fullest would be to just ask them if they’re happy with the way things are going and only try to change things if they are not. Of course, role playing is a particularly delicate form of social contract so your mileage in such circumstances may vary.

Exhibit Two: Bell's Palette of Identity

Bell the Wizard [made] this magic art palette, which, when used to paint a self-portrait, allows all status effects — basically anything you'd make a saving throw for — get transferred to the portrait instead. Users of the Palette must carry their self-portraits around wherever they go; if they don't have the paintings literally on their body, its powers are useless.

The linked article’s author speculates as to why the portrait must be kept in the possession of the character, tied around their left leg with fishing twine or whatever (rolled up around the inside of a knee-high boot?). The conclusion is that the Wizard Bell was just a bit rubbish not to have fully embraced this offshoot of the Picture of Dorian Gray.

There is, however, a simpler explanation for the item’s strange properties. Firstly, D&D characters have no real homes, they live in campsites and sleep in taverns. The party must never be split and must never stop moving. So the idea of an item that only works when placed on a shelf in the character’s home might lead to some awkwardness.

Also, what is the risk of an item that will make someone immune to whole swathes of rules in the game that cannot be accidentally ruined by a sword slash in the wrong place or accidentally landing up to the waist in swamp water? The properties of the magic palette are a quite obvious trade off of utility and plot convenience.

Exhibit Three: Ring of Bureaucratic Wizardry

When a wizard casts any spell while wearing the ring, a sheaf of papers and a quill pen suddenly appear in his hand. The papers are forms that must be filled out in triplicate explaining the effects of the spell, why the wizard wishes to cast it, whether it is for business or pleasure, and so on. The forms must be filled out before the effects of the spell will occur. The higher the level of the spell cast, the more complicated the forms become. Filling out the forms requires one round per level of spell.

This must have seemed like a cracking gag when it was dreamed up. Indeed it is a very good joke, it works on both a narrative and a ludic level. The joke transfers through the intra-digetic up to the meta level and actually means more things the more levels on which you appreciate it. If I understand correctly the advantage of the artifact would appear to be that the spell being cast is not subject to failure, just to bureaucratic delay.

To make a super-powerful spell operate guaranteed if the rest of the party can just hold off the enemy whilst the wizard does the necessary paperwork is a fantastic mental image. This leaves only one question. How did this item come to be? As I noted I imagine the sudden appearance of artifacts like these is likely to be reactive.

Maybe there was a wizard who was pretty pedantic and always cast low-risk spells leading to a situation where they just weren’t pulling their weight in the party (plus annoying pedants are annoying). This item seems like a cracking way to help address the balance in a way that gets people laughing about the situation.

Exhibit Four: Druid's Yoke

If you're in a D&D campaign where you need to do any kind of farming, you have bigger problems than any magical item can fix. But this yoke allows characters to — when they put it on themselves — turn into an ox. Not a magical ox; a regular ox. Then you can till your field yourself! You can't do it any faster, because again, you're just a goddamned ox, but it does allow you to… do the horrible manual labor… instead of the animal you've bred for this exact purpose. So that's… something someone would totally want. The best part? Once you've put it on, you can't take the yoke off; someone else has to do it for you. Because you're a goddamned ox.

Of all the artifacts that seem to have been created in reaction to a particular situation this one would appear to be the most specific. I can picture a campaign where, in order to get access to a particular bad guy, the players had to get access to a cattle market but the entry is restricted to people who had something to trade. They have money, but of course, the only place to buy a cow in time for the market is, unfortunately, the market: catch 22.

So they do find this Druid’s Yoke thingie which leads to an argument as to which team member will be, er, beefing up, for the market. After all anyone who can’t see the clear downsides to this not-so-genius plan must be a bit dense.

Obviously the plan goes sideways, how could it not? Now the rest of the team have to fight to reclaim their en-oxened party member in order to remove the yoke. Meanwhile the ox itself is trying to shake the yoke, or get it removed, by any means necessary. Hilarity is all but guaranteed to ensue.

Anyone who doesn’t see the narrative potential of this item isn’t thinking very hard. All you need to do is manufacture a reason for someone to put it on and let the rest of the plot flow from that circumstance.

Exhibit Five: Puchezma's Powder of Edible Objects

Interestingly, this odd item is one of the few D&D magical items that does have a back-story; apparently the unfortunately named Puchezma was a cheapskate who inadvertently created a powder that allowed him to eat any chewable material while trying to make a spice that would allow him to eat cheaper and cheaper food. With it, people can eat anything from cotton to tree leaves instead of bread and salted beef! Now, I would say if you're carrying around cotton, you might as well be carrying food. I would also say that if you plan on your player-character eating tree leaves to save fictional money you are very much missing the greater point of D&D.

This, along with another item called “fish dust” seem most obviously created in order to solve a pernickity problem. How to expediate the delivery of food to the players in unusual circumstances or, without exhaustive checks for success in a given activity.

Fish dust is a dust you sprinkle on water and it stuns the fish it touches causing them to float to the surface. Essentially it’s a kind of quiet way of dynamiting fish.

I can just see, in either case, that a party were either a) able to fish but the GM did not want to waste time on having them do so instead of getting on with the story or b) wandering through an ancient tomb of stuff with no food and in danger of starving to death. In each case the GM produced an item which mitigated the immediate problem and allowed the story to move on. No big mystery.

Exhibit Six: Mirror of Simple Order

"When a character steps in front of this mirror, he sees a strangely distorted image of himself. … There are eyes, a mouth, and a nose, but all lack character. Although the figure moves as the character does, it is shorter or taller than he is, adjusted in whatever direction approaches the average height of the character's race. Any clothing worn by the character is altered as well. Bright colors will be muted, appearing to be shades of grey. Any ornamental work on armor, weapons, or clothing will be gone. … He retains his level and class, but is not as exceptional as he might have been. He is bland and boring. The character's alignment changes to lawful neutral, and he becomes interested in little else other than setting order to the world." So there's a magical item that turns you into a soulless bureaucrat. I guess that's whose making those damn rings.

This is a fascinating artifact as, like the Ring of Contrariness, I can see it having been created as a “trap” for a particularly flair heavy and flamboyant player character, but the implications of the device reach far beyond this one usage. In fact, coming to think about it I cannot help but wonder if this is a reaction to a group losing a player who turned in a “unique” performance as an extrovert exhibitionist with bags of charisma.

Not wanting to kill the character or pass it along to another player the Mirror accomplishes the job of leaving the character largely as was but removing all of their individuality. Possibly there was a chance that the player would return, making the restoration of the player’s “true” character a subject for a twist in the narrative.

Essentially, in game terms, this artifact would seem like the perfect tool for turning an individual character into a bland back-up NPC for an uncertain duration and for this reason it is an object that only has its true meaning revealed in its meta-purpose. Intra-digetically to the narrative, of course, the effect of this mirror would be a terrible, subtle and deeply unsettling curse.

Chance Would Be A Fine Thing

Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.

They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.

We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.

On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.

I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.

The Year of the Gamer Beard

What's struck me, particularly, this Christmas is how far the ideas of No Dice have come in 2010. It hasn't been the most glamorous of years for the endeavour although we have got out into the world and played the hell out of some games. We've just kept plugging away at it. Something curious is starting to emerge.

Back at the start of this whole No Dice mullarkey what we were essentially doing was formalising aspects of what Role Players the world over know as "free form  role play" i.e. role play with few rules and not very much dice rolling. The problem I think most gamers had with that, if indeed they did have a problem with it, was that there wasn't very much to formalise.

This was true.

I think the further problem some of them may have had was that they believed that once it was done that would be it. There would be no more work to do. It would all peter out. I didn't believe that when I started and I'm amazed anyone should think that would be the case as of now.

The amount of narrative techniques we've mined out through just trying to make role playing more of an entertainment and less of a game has been staggering. I've spent my spare moments of the last few days grinding through archetypes and what not in an attempt to bring out the PULPiness of PULP. And that's just the beginning.

For this reason I have declared 2011 the year of the gamer beard because I imagine many theories will be unpacked in the next twelve months. I suppose I'd better go and get ready for that then.

Doing It For The Fans

 Long time, no blog, for reasons already expounded.

A mail from Matt today prompted me to reconsider the logic of the statement that content producers in various media love to gushingly proclaim: "We're doing this for the fans!"

Matt's mail addressed a perceived problem with the No Dice Core Book that people didn't like the introduction in length or content and it was putting people off the system. Maybe, maybe not. In my experience people are really good at making excuses for not doing this or that. We call people sheep because they resist and reject and reject and resist before, in some cases, running hell for leather towards some mediocre artefact because everyone else is doing it.

Digression! For example the number of moany twunts I've seen complaining that "Cards are not all that different from dice". Here's a simple experiment that proves the utter arsetwattery of such moans:

1) Sit on a sofa holding a D6.
2) Without leaning forward, to the side, employing the aid of any flat surface such as a table or the cover of your favourite "My Little Munchkin" Annual roll the dice to produce a satisfactory result.
3) Notice this is, at least, inconvenient.
4) Repeat the process, except this time hold a shuffled pack of cards in the hand of your choice. Draw rather than roll.
5) Now repeat with dice, but time how long it takes to roll the dice and read off the result.
6) Now repeat with cards and time how long it takes to make and read a draw.
7) Multiply the amount of time from 5 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 20 minutes.
8) Multiply the amount of time from 6 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 5 minutes.
9) Note how much time you save using a pack of cards.
10) Stop pretending that dice are the convenient randomiser of choice STFU and go away.

It certainly doesn't help that for everything on the good side of mediocre up there is 1000x as much stuff that slides off the grotesque hunchback of the distribution curve and leaves quality produce, or the stuff with potential, drowning in a sump of crap.

People have very strong filters for novelty, it's only necessity that pushes them beyond that. If I was a keen role player of the old school I would be put off No Dice because of its novelty. It's only because I find most role playing system books utterly unreadable, mired in pointless and restrictive micromangement details, filled with equations and charts that make most current role playing "statistics and probability for fun". People I role play with read the systems in order to hack them into something that requires far less effort. Those people are the kinds of people who will decide quite quickly that they've bought enough core books and they're going to do their own thing.

Many of these guys run the one system they could be bothered to finish reading through in pared down form, or just stick to homebrew, or homebrew something LIKE some system they skim read once but a hell of a lot lighter.

But I didn't get involved in No Dice to reach the other people, the people who play by the book, the people who are put off by the mere concept of reappraising their hobby. I believe that we wrote it for newbies and those who love role play as a form of narrative entertainment somehow sullied by arbitrary numeric systems that impede the development of plot.

We wrote No Dice for our friends. All the people who "get" No Dice are fans of it. All the people who just feel slightly nauseous reading the Introduction to the Core Book are not. So of course I'm "doing it for the fans". Who in their right mind would do it for the non-fans? Try and please a bunch of people who really couldn't care less if you died in a ditch? Who would do that?

So I guess like every other content producer and the rest of the gang I am obviously doing No Dice for the fans. Those people who want to whinge that they would love it more if we just changed the length and content of the introduction to sound like every other Role Playing System ever written can shove it up their anuses. If that is they can fit "it" up there with all the polyhedral dice, pencils, double sided character sheets, hex maps and rule expansions they've retained up there already.

Tortured anal retentive joke over I will mention that one of the projects for 2011 is the Core Book Redux. I've reread the Core Book and I can see a hell of a lot that's just plain wrong with it. However, I did not miss the absence of page after page after page of number crunch combat system.

(More To Follow.)

No Let Up

So now tipped from writing Levercastle into editing Levercastle and writing up Shadow Cities. Not due to slave driving, just taking an opportunity to stay on a roll...

I realises this means that blogging time has been severely curtailed but I will be back when I'm done on these tasks.

In the meantime I was corresponding with Matt about a game he was writing and the problems of algorithmic thinking. That in game design Matt proceeds from A to B to C to D and then the players come along and immediately understand C from where they go to B loop back round to D and then finally pay lip service to A whilst really thinking the root of the problem is E through G.

Infuriating to a Host with a linear mindset they regard as logical.

I posted back to him:

The problem you face is not one of logic, it's one of algorithmic thinking.

In algorithmic thinking you have a problem e.g. fierce guard dog between you and open back window.

And a bottom line outcome: Make it through window unmolested.

As long as your algorithm produces the bottom line then you cannot be said to have proceeded in an illogical fashion. All that can be argued is that you reached your bottom line in an innefficient way. To return to the tea example getting someone else to make the tea in exchange for some kind of payment is efficient in the short term as you can do something else while person x makes the tea but inefficient in that it burns up resources you could have used to pay for something more useful.

In the end all players are trying to do is get the most efficiency out of their algorithmic thinking. You as Host may disagree as you see fit but players are entitled to their own reasoning if their solution gets to the bottom line in a way they can live with...

And that's all he wrote. Feel free to agree/disagree whatever in the notes.

Crawling Toward The Finish Line

Back from Belper and keen to relay gory details but for now suffice to say that my favourite session of the weekend for general hilarity and mirth filled darkness has to have been OTE. Least favourite for running smoothly but certainly no slouch in the "fresh ideas" camp was Dreamtime which was intellectually stimulating whilst being a bit slow to play. Work is ongoing.

Other than that I am pounding the keys frantically on the home stretch with Levercastle which nearly has a magic system and does, in fact, have an Alchemy system which all the failed alchemists in my campaign may be pleased, or nervous, to hear.

For now though, arrivederci.

Missing By A Mile

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

2010: The Year We Got Busy

I wish that the amusing implication of the post title was anywhere near accurate. No, a more literate version of the semantics is to be inferred.

The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.

Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.

We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.

Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!

2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?

P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.

Yikes!

So RoboJoe stole the show... *sigh* worst X Factor winner Evar! (relatively speaking, Leon Jackson was a massive anti-climax but he wasn't up against talent like Olly, Danyl and Stacey, he also wasn't following talent like Alexandra and JLS).

I've been creating a wiki for No Dice. This will replace the soon to be extinct No Dice Forums. Have a look around. There's already a bunch of stuff in System Hacks.

Also Random Encounters is out! The ideal Chrimbo gift! Buy one now! ;)

Have a good Monday!

Tweeting The Second Time Around

I have to ask myself the question: Am I just not getting it or is Twitter, in fact, rubbish?

The first time round I didn't give the world of Tweeting a chance; so I'm back on with a Twitter feed that is on the public timeline and trying to get my head round all this "Trending Topics" nonsense. I even looked on here for a widget to put in the sidebar which would allow people to see my Tweets but there doesn't appear to be an "official" one so that quest came to a hasty end, in the first instance.

Still, I am determined not to be one of these people who showers scorn on something just because he doesn't really get it. I want to get it before I shower scorn on it because for the life of me I don't know why all these celebrities and whatnot think it's so amazing. I had a quick look at Charlie Brooker's feed and the massively tiled background photo, preponderance of profanity and surreal disconnection of an unnetworked feed sent me away underwhelemed.

Perhaps I will warm to it...

I think I'm "searchable" so why not look for me. After all that's the idea of this stuff, surely.

In other news: they're making a film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies cue mind-boggling at the intertextuality.

An underwhelming set of duets is planned for the X Factor Final. In the office the prevailing attitude is that nobody should win because they're all rubbish. As long as Robojoe fails to win I really don't mind. I think it may well be Olly, if it's not Robojoe. If it is Robojoe I predict a christmas number one and then almost certain obscurity as people fail to care. An unfortunate wastage of the X Factor prize fund. Who knows if he wins I may try to push "Killing In The Name Of" to number one for Christmas as the Facebook group wishes.

The only thing that's news-y about the revelation that most people won't pay extra for TV in HD is that the BBC thinks this is news. I remember watching  the clarity and beauty of the clear digital image slack jawed when DVD was released. But HD only improves on DVD a tiny little bit, and is monstrously more pricey. Whoever thought people would pay premium for that is stupid and greedy. Like I said, big news, not.

It appears that now people can see how whichever government is in power at the time is apparently squandering taxpayer money at Where Does My Money Go dot org. 53bn on General Public Services, eh? That'll buy a lot of second homes and duck houses... Pardon my cynicism. How long before someone registers wheredoesmymoneyreallygo.org? I can picture a wonderful parody with coloured circles representing "Down the back of the sofa", "Government 'Sharp Exit In Case Of Coup' Fund" and so on and so forth. It's all very well being able to see how the government our wasting the sweat of our collective brows but if we don't like the size or number of coloured circles in a particular category what, exactly, are we supposed to do? Ask for a refund?

Meanwhile, the taxman is complaining that his old computers are stopping him pwning us for all the money we might possibly owe. So let's get this straight, shall we? The government wants to plunge us back into misery and gloom in 2010 by charging us more tax for everything and the taxman is moaning because he can't screw us for an even greater amount... It seems as if we never needed a website to answer the question about where our money went. The answer is quite obvious.

Well, as always it's up to the personal world to rescue me from such gloomy thoughts. There's bacon, sausage, Dreamtime Stories and a generally sociable weekend in my immediate future. It seems all my money goes on buying cuts of dead pig... yum.

Okay so...

It's definitely been a while but I think given that I had a wedding to help organise I can be forgiven. Also I fell victim to the usual August malaise that seems to affect everyone. Having said that we punted out a couple of podcasts and got some RP done even despite this.

It's only the poor old blog that seems to be suffering. I have to say that it hasn't really been a time for profound thought, or indeed even interesting thought. Mostly I've just been getting through stuff and ploughing ahead.

Mrs, myself, the doodler and another friend have all booked and paid for our places at the upcoming games weekend organised by a friend in the wilds of Derbyshire. The experience is unfailingly a complete escape from reality for a few days. I myself have never experienced the specially extended version of the weekend that goes from Wednesday night all the way through to Monday morning but I imagine the sense of reality dislocation is going to be the most intense it's ever been.

The good thing about that is that you come back to real life suffused with the feeling that you have actually experienced a Narnia-esque amount of time in a parallel dimension. The bad thing is that the reality shock sucks really really bad.

Still, the highs of such an experience are way in excess of the lows, so bring it on!

The cat has been to the vets for a little family unplanning and is staggering around the house with stiches in her side and one of those funny collars on. It has to stay there for ten days. It's quite upsetting because we're used to her leaping about the place full of beans and looking, well, like a cat. Now she's trying to be energetic, but also trying to ditch the collar and the stitches appear to have had more of an impact than she'd like to admit.

I'm looking forward to ten days time when she might start, once more, to look more like our cat.

We're having a board game session tonight followed by the Season 2 finale to our Over the Edge campaign on Saturday. So for the next five weeks life looks set to be fairly normal.

I guess I can cope with that.

The Glorious British Summer

Well, after a week off resting it's taken me about two days back in the cut and thrust of every day life to feel like I need another holiday. The silly season is well underway now, dead buses in the morning and a general apathy in just about everyone.

Ironically we have been doing quite a bit of role playing at this time. Polishing off one off play testing, exploring a hack or two. Yup, no slackness here on that front. I'm starting to think that the time to compile all of our endeavours is not long off...

I can't help but notice the insistent rain. I wonder if this will drive people back to their PCs and hopefully help revive the forum.

Gamer Fatigue?

I find myself wondering about the phenomenon known as "Gamer Fatigue". This is where some person in your gaming community announces that they are "taking a break from RP" and withdraws, mysteriously, into seclusion. To me this seems a bit like "taking a break from Movies" or "taking a break from TV". Gaming, to me, is a form of entertainment, not a chore.

I can understand when people say they're going to "take a break from the gym to concentrate on swimming". I guess I just never really regarded gaming as such an intensive pastime. This points the way to a further set of concepts within gaming I hadn't really thought about before. When I find a television drama, a novel or a computer game compelling it's often on the point of it giving me new ideas or insight into the construction of stories for others. Weirdly this means I often don't like playing in games as I can't really just rip off another Host. Gaming is virgin territory for many gimmicks.

This leads to two further notes. One, that I know other people take their gaming very seriously and look upon the opportunity to play a role as an actual creative enterprise. Some people, myself included, look on their character as a way to interact with the story environment, they are contributing a performance within the rules in order to keep the game going. The other note is that role playing games haven't yet progressed to the point where there is a startling bloom of innovation.

To deal with these points in reverse order. It seems that all the RP that has gone on since D&D has been much after the fashion of people taking pictures of moving objects with early movie cameras. Unlike the former activity, however, because it is not enormously expensive and doesn't have much in the way of toys people have largely ignored this innovation in entertainment (did I mention it also has few military applications). RP's not good for much except as a really cool form of entertainment. The problem is that innovation in the field has been restricted to new methods for number-juggling.

I love RP so much that when my partner didn't want to play I changed the hobby to make it suit her more, now I love it even more myself.

But this is weighty stuff. It also leads back to the former point.

I know a lot of people get "RP Burnout" at present. This is like the reverse of "cinema frustration" in which there are too few movies you want to see out when you fancy a visit to the pictures. RP Burnout is where you've role played so much you just can't take it any more. I think I experienced something similar with console games a while back. I'd just played so many of the damnable things I couldn't play any more or it felt like my brain would fall out. Also console games achieve nothing for the player whereas the benefits of socialisation and group interaction at least give RP a social dimension.

I imagine if you did anything enough then it would lead to a similar situation, if they did release enough movies that you could go all day every day for a month you would probably get sick of going to the movies (in fact at film festivals I believe this is what happens to some). However we roleplay once a week and occasional weekends. At the moment we're doing a little more because we're playtesting new adventures. I'd actually like to adopt a slightly less intensive posture after this testing phase.

But what I'm left with after considering these points is even more clarification of what players want out of the RP experience. I know that Mrs Monkey has been finding some of the experiences very hard of late. I think at the point where you feel guilty because you should have done more is precisely the time that you should start to do more.

I think what I need to get across to people that the RP is an entertainment. Levercastle tends to be treated as such. I think what also needs to happen is not only that the players say what they expect out of the experience but the Host needs to say what he can see happening bearing in mind the characters as presented. If people know what's coming up in a vague sense of the word then they can prepare accordingly.

I think that's actually mentioned in the Core Book but the fine tuning of the concept still seems to be a little off. Ho hum. Back to tinkering.

The Joker In The Pack

No sooner do I lament the complete lack of anything that makes for a substantial post than KA-BLAM! something amazing socks me in the face; almost literally in this case.

When I was compiling the Core Book I tried to include everything I could think of at the time to make a sourcebook for the budding No Dicer. It is inevitable that things should be missed. Almost everything that's coming in the Random Encounters series is intended to be filled with examples of powerful things that you can do with No Dice principles. So in each adventure we're kind of expanding the toolkit of the prospective Host and also giving a concrete example of potential play.

Last night we play tested the Monster Action Thriller "The Creature of Black Lake" and got off to a rocky start. Basically an incident mentioned in the notes that's supposed to just happen resulted in the death of a player's character before the adventure had even started.

This was notable for several reasons but not least because that's really not supposed to happen. I know that people have been keen to discuss the idea of abitrary character death recently but this basically put someone out of the game in the first forty minutes.

Not only that but I experienced an incident of Host meltdown, a brief autopsy of the situation lead to the conclusion that the wires of communication were badly crossed and for a while there it all looked grim. You see, the whole point of No Dice is that it's supposed to help you sidestep these issues and keep going. If an adventure has a serious hole that relies on a certain series of incidents not happening then it's just not working.

A workable suggestion was put forward by Justin who suggested that when you hit the blind alley you as Host rewind the action to just before everything went pear and then re-explained the situation giving the player an out.

Like I say, this is workable but it's not really all that neat. It means that a player could take a one way trip up diarrhea drive and then like the Prince of Persia just rewind and do it again.

It was Sue who hit on the real answer. Which in a discussion that followed broadened out from a specific instance in that adventure to become a general principle that Core Book is sorely missing. Oh well, for the second edition I suppose.

But for those of you who don't want to wait n years for the 2nd ed here's the idea right now. Treasure this one, it's golden:

Creating NPCs is always a problem. 95% of NPCs are just cyphers of course. They are barkeeps, random wandering citizens and other reasonably easy to scope functionaries.

That other 5% are the important ones. Many of these, probably just over half, are villains and again there isn't really a problem with them. It's that last 2% that can leave the Host scratching their head.

These are the "major friendly NPCs". Don't be fooled, just because they're marked "friendly" doesn't mean they're always happy to see the players, it more or less just means they won't just try to kill the players on sight.

In the Core Book I got as far as advising people to avoid "infoblaster" NPCs who just know everything. And I also advised against making NPCs as powerful or more powerful than the player characters who were supposedly their allies.

Aside from that I just recommended a Host create "real" characters using the Player's Guide notes to make a fully rounded and realised character.

In some cases this might be fine. But in reality players don't really spend all that much time talking to NPCs just for fun. So a lot of the Host's fine character creation work goes by the wall.

Besides, once you've stopped the NPCs being more powerful when they're too friendly you've kind of left yourself in a bit of a bind.

The problem is sometimes you want characters to move the plot on. They are supposed to arrive, do something dramatic and then leave the players to deal with the fall out.

So how does one do this without making them villainous or too powerful? After all a constant parade of utter villainy keeps things busking along but really in a story based RP you want other types of encounter.

This was exactly the problem in Creature. I had an NPC who needed to rather aggressively insert himself into the party and provide useful plot information, in a guarded manner, for the remainder of the adventure (or at least until he died). I had written up notes for this character which were pretty light. I wanted to introduce him and then, in the playtest, develop him in some way into a fully realised character.

So when he came in to the action I kept him neutral. The only problem with this is that he was neutrally holding up the party's boat with AK47s. As I quickly discovered this kind of thing can be misinterpreted as open aggression. Funnily enough, had he gone in with open aggression the accidental adventure ruining bloodbath that resulted from my weak characterisation would have been averted. Then, of course, the players would have had to just follow along on rails.

On rails is not a good place for adventures to be.

So I needed to, rather than render the character neutral and hence weak, render him a little bit charming and crazy and hence allow characters to interact with him even though he was, technically, a bad dude.

This is a really exciting dramatic position, the guy's holding you hostage but he's quite willing to have a conversation with you about begonias (or whatever). As a player you feel you might be able to negotiate or something.

At the same time the Host has someone who can nudge the characters back on task if they look like they're about to commit suicide or whatever.

This guy's a great NPC, not too overpowering but not too floppy either. He's not going to interfere unless you need him too. He's a joy to have involved.

And hence was born the Joker.

You see Creature is not alone in needing a character like this. Every role play session could do with having a Joker to interact with the players, nudging, testing, exploring their characters.

The situation where the Joker is a guy who has technically taken the Players as hostages, but in a polite way, is just one possible scenario. Characters who have vast reserves of information they are unwilling to share, characters who offer money, or professional services desired by the players all of these are ideal Joker characters.

The secret is to always lay on the unthreatening manner on thick. This was my vital mistake last night. Neutrality won't cut it if an NPC has some power over the players. The character has to maintain their power over the character while entertaining the player.

I'm not saying that making them will be easy but there is a way to make it easier. Sue loves poker and she quickly put me on to the old poker trope of trying to find the sucker at the table. Essentially when you come up with an adventure design your job is to try to identify the Joker(s) at the table and then make them around their role in the story.

Some stories, Con of the Dead, Revelation Point, don't really need a Joker character. Then we return to the poker trope: if after ten minutes searching for the Joker in the scenario you still can't find them, it's you.

Yes, in some adventures it is the Host himself who takes this gently tormentative role for the players. Horror splatter scenarios are the most likely to feature these.

So from now on when I'm dealing up a new scenario I will be sure to use a deck comprised of 53 cards. The joker's going to become one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal.

NB: That last sentence was a dramatic article closer. You don't need to actually draw a card to know when to make the Joker NPC, you just kind of look for them after you've finished your notes.

Welcome To The Silly Season

I've started to notice a significant drop off in vocal activity. It's about that time from late June until early September when people drop off the radar for weeks on end, it gets a shade too hot to be hitting the keyboard, people are motivated towards eating, drinking and otherwise gadding about doing frivolous things.

And what of we, the Hosts? The artists? The creatives? I know that Mrs Monkey is busy working on her female oriented RP epic. I'm knee deep in writing for RE Vol 1 and Justin's sketching away for the same volume.

So what is there to report?

Not much.

Welcome to the silly season.

I could tell you that I had had some vague thoughts about helping out the aspiring RP hacker, or that I'd suddenly found that names are really important in Over The Edge, or that I was slightly concerned about the amount of goodies we're thinking of introducing into RE Vol 1...

But none of it makes a full post.

Besides, in the case of item 2 I'd really rather you had to ponder that one yourself. Names? Over The Edge? Hmmmm.

Blinking Hot!

I think the thing that annoys me most about this weather is that everywhere that's not air conditioned grinds to a sticky, sluggish halt. You breathe in apathy and breathe out lethargy. This, of course, discourages any kind of activity like sitting at a PC talking about role playing, or actually role playing.

The only thing I find myself particularly grateful for is that we have invented an RPG that can, if needs must, be played just about anywhere. Including in the cool air of an open sky evening as the sun sinks not slowly enough in the West.

This is an option I think we are going to have to look towards with keen interest as the stickiness quotient rises even further...

Skills To Pay The Bills

As a long time Scaper I am no stranger to the benefit that special abilities or skills bring to a board game. A large part of Scape tactics come about from selection of units with complementary skill sets or units that may give an edge if the luck of the d20 is with the unit commander. In a tabletop skirmish game skills are awesome. The basic version of Scape has no skills and it sucks like a nuclear powered Dyson. No, in a tabletop game skills are that all important edge that makes an extra bit of fun for participants.

So I imagine when Monsieur Gygax was thinking about D&D the idea of dropping skills from the units was anathema and I can understand the point of view. A wargame or similar with no unit-specific skill matrix is yawnsome.

To further expand on my Scape example a Scape figure has five major ratings, Attack, Defence, Range, Movement and Life. A skill gives some advantage that increases these ratings either permanently or given some random event or particular set of circumstances. There are angels with shields who automatically double their defence. Furious samurai who can add to their attack when they engage the enemy. Gorilla soldiers who can move twice as far while the cat suited secret agents are on the field.

The reason this increases the fun in wargames is that the game runs within very strict rules and the number of outcomes to a particular scenario, vast as they may be, are finite.

Now let's make a sideways move into role play.

My favourite skills system ever in a role playing game is the Over The Edge system, where you basically make up your own skills and get dice pools in them. There are skills that a lot of people might have like "fighting" and then skills that people might not choose like "make up artist". The joy of it being your character can be good at whatever you like.

Of course this case is all a matter of scope the number of situations that could arise in RP are vast compared to the number of situations that could come up in a skirmish game. The chances that a general amnesty could be called in a skirmish and that because it's christmas day the characters will engage in a pleasant game of footie are slim to fat. It's not part of the game's scope.

Set a scenario in a WWI trench on christmas day and watch what happens. Exactly.

The immediate reaction of the role play scenario creator to this problem is to start mucking about with "skill trees" and the like. I don't know why any human being starts thinking "I can taxonomically record every skill a human being could ever need" or even "other people will find rooting around in my taxonomy fun" or even "this hideous conglomeration of number soup will be the one thing that makes the game worth playing". I'm not sure anyone does think the last one. In fact I think that people probably don't even regard them as a necessary evil. They might get as far as necessary but evil?

Evil can mean a lot of things. When you're trying to play an RPG evil is anything that turns the game into a laborious time waster. So I think large skill trees certainly fit into that most of the time.

Note here I'm not talking about suggested skills. Having a vast array of contextualising information about the kinds of skills one might have is not a problem. Especially not if your skillcyclopaedia indicates the proper definition of all skills should be agreed between Host and Player before play commences. Remember the player wants the coolest persona that won't break the game and the Host wants to provide the most thrilling experience into which the characters fit like perfect players in the dramatic events of the story.

I've never met a player who wouldn't agree to prune the power to feel more like they fit in the world. Power gamers tend to be caught in a well intentioned attempt to cover all possible bases. Power Game characters tend to lean on their magic character stat though and this makes for a one-dimensional character most times.

I've never come across an RPG where the variety of skills available was particularly what made the game in fact I've never seen one where telling the player any finite number of skills is all the skills that exist is anything more than a massive bummer to the players.

If you want to give the players a menu of skills and say get on with it you're not Hosting properly. The skills a player may or may not need in the course of an adventure or campaign should always be a negotiation between player and Host and should never come off a list.

That's how I do it, that's how Over the Edge does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

Frantic Preparation Abounds

Those of you champing at the bit to get a copy of the Core Book will be pleased to hear that the final few bits and pieces are coming together nicely. We've had tentative conversations speculating about what kind of business it might do.

When I published my novels I knew how badly they would do. I am a very harsh reader and rarely read any novels unless they really grab my attention. I am apt to view my own work in the same light. Sure it's a good novel, I might think, but there are thousands of good novels that don't sell well.

But a game?

The scope of a game is different. If you're Harry Potter you can sell yourself to millions of people world wide, no role playing game will ever outsell you not even a Harry Potter RPG. But if you are an unknown but pretty decent novel you could go through a print run of 600 copies 550 of which will get remaindered and no one will ever know who the hell you were.

RPGs are far more narrow band. If an RPG is decent it will shift a few units no matter what. Or at least that's the way it seems. Of course if you write a rubbish RPG it fares about as well as the unknown decent novel. But there is some kind of meritocracy in the world of the RPG. Good stuff makes a mark, bad stuff makes a different kind of mark. The community is communicative and keen.

It's a world I understand. While I'd never really be able to sell a novel to someone without resorting to "it might give you an idea for an RPG session" I can tell every role player who ever lived that they need to look at No Dice.

In the latest podcast (#5 up this weekend) Justin talks about the appraisal of D&D 4e which states that it's a game that does an epic job of removing all the RP. Well No Dice is almost the polar opposite it's a Role Play tool that hacks the game down to a minimum.

Thus if people want to mix their game complexity with some RP fun it might be best to buy both. One's a game, the other supports you in Role Play, together they might just make beautiful musics... or they might just make a terrible hideous carnage filled mess.

The point is valid. I have always looked on No Dice as an addendum to crunchier systems because if I want crunch I can easily get myself stocked up. If I want to examine parts of the RP experience that don't involve crunch there's limited resource available. And what is there isn't terribly well organised.

So I'm keeping my phylanges crossed that people see things the way the No Dice Crew do. I guess we'll find out come June 1st and thereafter.

My own personal ambition that we've done something really good is when we sell around 1000 copies of the printed book. My target to know it wasn't a complete waste of time and energy is at a more conservative 50 copies.

There's a hell of a lot of legroom inbetween for stuff to evolve.

Modern Storytelling

I remember once Mike made a comparison between roleplaying and the ancient art of storytelling. He wasn't wrong either. Sure, the details have changed but a lot of what goes on (at least round our way) under the guise of role playing is actually group storytelling. What struck me at the time was that before the widespread adoption of the printing press, before radio, before television, these activities must have gone on. They must have because we still know ancient myths even though they could not be set down and widely distributed (to most people) until some time in the 19th Century.

Storytelling was, if anything, an orally transmitted and propagated cultural phenomenon in its old form. When you could read from a book, or listen to the radio, when you could go to the movies, watch television or play a computer game it looked like the ancient art of storytelling was redundant. It served no purpose. It was just a phase humanity went through before it got a next gen console.

I can't question what Mr. Gygax was thinking about when he invented D&D. It seems pretty obvious on one level. What he has ended up doing is paving the way for storytelling to come back. This is what I love about role playing books. They're not an attempt to replace a group activity involving people interacting. They're a support to that process. All the stories of the World of Darkness are just prologue to the player campaigns.

A weighty heritage for a hobby that has not thus far managed to cast off its geek-laden roots.

It's come to me recently, over and over, that there must have been a real hunger at some level of society for the return of group storytelling because the original roleplaying set up just doesn't seem like a terribly attractive proposition.

RPGs at their inception were games. You could win and you could lose. The roll of the dice was a core component in "beating" the dungeon adventure. Scores were vital. These trappings, the trappings of the competitive pursuit have proven almost impossible for the hobby to cast off so far. There just hasn't been anyone to reshape any part of it into a discrete entertainment experience.

So Justin and I are writing the manual but make no mistake this is something the people we knew were tending towards anyway. There are a few vital ingredients that we have had to bring in from the cold but the core of No Dice is the making available of a group storytelling experience to a culture that neglected and carelessly forgot how to engage in it. Not that I think modern story based role play is much like a storytelling experience of yore but the parts that are the same are vital, community, communication, sharing time as a group.

We were lucky enough at the weekend to have a complete role-play n00b join us for the preview event. I ran a hitherto notorious zombie romp called "Con of the Dead" which relies a little on the participants having some knowledge of SF television. Until now this has never been a problem in the groups I have encountered. Our n00b however, didn't watch any television particularly and so was in danger of missing many of the in-jokes.

The problem of being the Host is that even if people find their minds numb at the end of the day the tendency is to smile and nod and thank you because people realise how much work you must have done and feel that criticising it would be rude. So I asked our n00b how he liked the session and he said all the right things. After the session I asked Sue whether she got the same vibe.

This is the joy of Sue. People will tell her what they think even if it's that they thought my game sucked. Quite the reverse occurred in this case and we may have one more enthusiastic player to join in the fun of the non-Marauders week game. Justin wryly remarked that we'd have to monitor this "Pied Piper" effect closely. We already split off a monthly group to make a weekly one. Now it looks like we may end up splitting off the weekly one to make, er, two weekly groups if we're not careful.

As Justin rightly pointed out the real answer is to get people skilled up to take the No Dice approach out to the world. Then we don't have to keep catering for fresh addicts who want a gaming fix. Not that I mind trying to fill my life with gaming activities and introducing the hobby to new people but there are so many hours in a day, days in a week and so on and so forth.

D&D Characters

I know, I know, I'm having a pop at D&D again. I'm going to reiterate that if D&D floats your boat then go for it. It's actually a highly sophisticated dungeon-crawl RPG and I'd prefer to think of people enjoying a D&D campaign than playing hours of WoW. But it's just not role playing. Well, not given any reasonable definition of the words "role" and "playing" when in the context of one another anyway.

This has never been made more apparent to me than in the unfortunate habit I have encountered in some gamers to create what I shall dub the "D&D Character". The D&D Character must satisfy the following brief to be considered thus:

• Must have a fascinating instant impact or be unusual in some way for examples of class, race, occupation, alignment etc. This feature in a proper story would serve as a hook for the character. In a game where one has to start the adventure with a large degree of presumed incompetence could also explain this hilarious incapability away. For example, if you created a normal everyday hulking warrior with a big sword to kill things with his early incompetence is nothing short of embarrasing. However if Jongar the Allyrian is obsessed with cheese one could point to his failure to perform even the simple tasks of his trade as a being a byproduct of his unhealthy pecadillo.
• Could have a detailed but largely tertiary back story; thus explaining the cheese obsession. Also it will probably dangle alluring plot hooks for a GM who hardly, if ever, finds a way to work these into the story which wouldn't involve shoehorning, long periods of not using dice or showboating from the player who invented the character. Of course in a story people mill about they come to the fore, they retreat, they circulate. If you had some support for group storytelling instead of a bunch of dice heavy combat rules... ahem.
• Is designed to always have something to talk about in a one or two-dimensional manner. These are never deep things and are always topics of conversation that can be pulled out for a "character moment" at the drop of a hat e.g. having an imaginary friend, being a bit dodgy and a pointlessly pathological liar, having an obsession with some harmless and often incongruous topic such as toast or flower arranging... yes, yes, or cheese.

The symptom, as is so often the case, points to the disease. Generally speaking I've not met role players who weren't yearning for a part in a game that allowed them to feel like the hero properly. Sure there should be challenge and difficulty otherwise the game is dull but in the end the challenge and difficulty should arise from factors other than the character's blatant incompetence. It's a well worn trope of fiction that a character should be likeable and in heroes capability is likeable.

When you create a character who has to be lame until they've levelled up a few times you necessarily begin to be irritated by them during this process. Making them into a bit of a weirdo accomplishes the twin aims of poking fun at your pathetic character but also gives you a chance to vent your frustrations at a game which promises so much and delivers so little. The D&D character provides a way of letting off steam and having fun in a situation which, despite claims to the contrary, is short on opportunities to do either out of the box.

In fact this tendency also works against the player ever getting that moment in the sun. Even if a GM is adventurous and allows Jongar to encounter the evil master baker who grilled him like so many pieces of medium sliced white when he was naught but a boy the player's already made it quite plain that Jongar's a looney. If you were trying to run a semi-serious campaign Jongar's either got to be less of a looney or the whole encounter is going to end up on a Python-esque route perhaps not entirely inkeeping with the spirit of the game.

I have, on occasion known GMs to bemoan this very thing, when the game turns "silly". It's six of one half a dozen of the other. So Jongar's player is making a mockery of the serious plot, let's face it having to roll 2D6, 1D8 a D20 and a D4 every time Jongar swings his mighty broadsword also makes a mockery of the serious plot, just not in a fun way.

Just as attempting to introduce plot to a board game may be a bit of a morale killer so making merry quips within the "plot" framework is a counter morale boost.

So this dysfunction balances out nicely in that type of game. In a game that has a serious story potential, however, the dysfunction just collapses into broken.

D&D characters are no good in the long haul, five or six episodes and the character's all played out. They don't have subtlety, layers, aspects, they just have furry underpants and an obsession with toast. It all seemed so amusing at the beginning but now? Hmmm.

So next time I'm creating a character concept I will be sure to make sure there is definite dramatic complication in there. Now the story is real I want to be a real character within it. If that's what you've been yearning for in your campaigns, either as a GM or a player maybe it's time you tried to find a solution.